Last week from 26 July – 1 Aug 2014, I was at GNOME’s annual event GUADEC this time organized in Strasbourg, France a WOW city. I got the opportunity to meet people who really work hard to make GNOME a reality, who brings life to GNOME. Before going to GUADEC, I used to know these computing wizards just by names and IRC nicks, and few of them by pics on internet. The venue was EPITECH, a software engineering school, Located at 4 rue du dome situated in the heart of Strasbourg, venue is at the about 300 meters away from the Cathedral, again a magnificent piece of art.

GUADEC Venue

When I first entered the venue on Saturday, It was lunch time so there were not many people. The first person I met I remember was Andre Klapper, from Czech Republic a cool dude. Then I ran upstairs on the second floor I met Ekaterina Gerasimova, a member Board of Directors, my OPW internship mentor, I got the warm welcome from her. In spite of being busy organizing things, she herself took me to Foyer de l’Étudiant Catholique (FEC), the place where sponsored people were supposed to stay, located within walking distance of the conference venue (400 metres). I loved the place as for me it was no less than a wonderland.

After 5.00 pm we used to hang around for sight seeing, picnic, dinner etc.

GNOME Foundation member Emily Chen, who works with engagement team, she successfully organized GNOME.Asia this year and also brought sponsorship for GUADEC 2014. Co-incidentally she was residing in the room next to me. We were going together into our rooms, while entering in our respective rooms, suddenly, she said”Oh! we are neighbors”, Then I realized true dear, we are neighbors indeed because of the geographical boundaries of our countries too and I was smiling deep inside my heart.

On the last day of my GUADEC trip that is 31 July, I spent gala time with Julita, I thank you Julita for your time.

On 1 Aug at 8.15 am I had to board my bus from grand Centrale, Strasbourg to Frankfurt, Germany, to my surprise I met JeffFortin he told me that he had twittered the last night that if anybody is going to board the same. Anyways, We went together from Strasbourg to Frankfort Airport, he is an amazing personality, he highly value work and time, he took out his laptop start making his fingers dance on the keypad.

He gave me information about few very good tools in Linux like powertop for checking power consumption, GNOME commander for managing files. He within no time created a new application to calculate total time spent over a project as he is very particular about the accuracy. He is a gentleman, he helped me to get the boarding pass form a machine about which I had no idea as it was my first trip outside India.

GUADEC is the biggest event which stands for GNOME Users and Developers European Conference and takes place annually in any of the European countries. This time GUADEC 2014 is going to take place in Strasbourg, France from 26 July – 1 August.

Being a Dec 2013-Mar 2014 OPW’s intern and a GNOME’s foundation member I have been given the opportunity to attend this great conference.

It was not easy to make this dream come true. The journey starts here:

I got a mail from GNOME’s travel sponsorship committee to apply for sponsorship. After applying and re-applying after corrections, luckily I got selected for the sponsorship.

After few days of the confirmation I got two letters. First, Letter of Invitation from Linux Logistique and Letter of Travel Sponsorship from GNOME Foundation signed by Andreas Nilsson, President GNOME Foundation and Secretary Linux Logistique.

Now comes visa process. I had already failed once in getting UK visa successfully in Jan 2014. So, from the very beginning I was very cautious for each and every document required by the French Embassy. This time I collected all the documents very carefully avoiding mistakes that I did previously. It took me the longest time of about two weeks to get one of the mandatory document required by French visa. It is the NOC form MRIU, Faridabad, the organisation for which I work.They say that they don’t give NOC for just going to attend the conference even after showing them all the invitation and sponsorship letters. In the mean time I got mail from Marina with the subject “interns’ lightning talks at GUADEC”. I forwarded this mail to them and finally they got convinced and I could get the last important document as well for my visa process.

Finally, I got all the papers arranged in proper order and scheduled my appointment at the VFS France Visa Application Centre on 8 July 2014, Tuesday at 9.00 am. I submitted my all the documents at about 11.30 am.

Now, I was waiting for the message from the visa office. To my surprise, I got message on 11 July 2014 (Just within 4 days) that decision has been on my visa request and I can come for the collection any time between 9.00 am – 4.00 pm. I went for the collection of my passport on 14 July 2014, Monday at 9.00 am sharp. When I opened the envelop, wow, there was a visa inside. The confirmation of the permission of my first foreign visit. Opportunity to get to about know about the new world of opportunities. I really very happy.

I have been assigned a job to educate the staff(teaching and the non-teaching ) of a University in Faridabad (NCR), India to use Linux as an Operating System at work because of its various benefits. I was supposed to start with the project from the first week of May 2014. It is delayed because of the response from the higher authorities. Now I have got a green signal from all. I will soon post the date on which I am going to start the training. It is more than a year now that I am using Linux and GNOME as its desktop environment. I am really happy about learning and using it. But to make others to enjoy using it would be a real challenging job.

I need to get ready a lab of about 30 PCs. As it is planned that my first batch would be of 30 people. I have been asked about the configurations of the system and the distribution that I would like to get installed on them. Till now I have worked on Linux(ubuntu & fedora) for my personal use only. I don’t know, which distribution and what configuration would be better on the such a big scale. I am really puzzled from where shall I start? what should I teach first? What technique would be effective?

I truly wish to make an impact on my audience. For that I need to do a lot of home work. Any kind of support form the experts would be highly appreciated. Please give me suggestions which distributions and its version would be suitable and what would be the minimum hardware requirements. Of course! GNOME would be installed on each computer system.

Non-teaching staff basically uses ms-office. so I am planning to give 2-3 lectures on open-office. What all should I teach to make people feel comfortable using Linux? I am looking forward for the help.

I was at bootConf 2014 presented by JMILUG and associates, on Sunday, 12.30 pm, 23 Mar 2014 . I attended the nice talk on Android vs Linux security being presented by Shariq Murtaza, after that there was a lunch break, at around 2.30 pm we all gathered again at the conference hall and as per the schedule Kornark Modi delivered a very informative talk on iPython, nice to meet such a talented and amazing personality.

Just after Konark concluded it was my turn to talk about GNOME. I started with, what is GNOME? Who is GNOME? and How and why I am here and finally how to join GNOME? In the conference hall, there were about 20-25 people including 2 girls. The best thing was everybody present there is FLOSS enthusiast. I had a great feeling that I am one of them. I liked there support and Love for FLOSS. As I finished my talk, they appreciated my efforts. Girls geared up to take part in GSoC and OPW.

Finally, Aniket Maithani cool chubby guy ;) , delivered a nice talk on the powers of Drupal. I really enjoyed every moment there. Thanks GNOME and OPW, otherwise I could never be a part of FLOSS. Looking forward to contribute more and be a part of more Open Source conferences.

I am writing help for gnome-music as my opw internship project. My mentor reviewed my patches. I pushed them all without music. I was very upset because if something doesn’t works properly, it hurts.

Vadim Rutkovsky (IRC nick-vrutkovs) already has helped me that how I can make gnome-music work but I failed. I was following Jackson Isaac at gnome-music channel, he was having the same problem few days back. He too was looking for help in #gnome-music. Suddenly, yesterday i.e. Monday, 10 march 2014, he told #gnome-music that he can play music on gnome-music now. Indeed, it was a great news for people like me who is struggling since last three months. Out of curiosity, I asked him how he did this? Thanks to nice people on the channel for their ready to help attitude.

I could get no success yesterday. When I get connected to the GimpNet network and joined #gnome-music today, JacksonIsaac himself queried if I could play any music. My response was negative. As I told my problem to him he probably sensed where I was wrong. His tip worked and I am really very happy.

To make gnome-music play songs using Jhbuild

After building gnome-music using:

$Jhbuild build gnome-music

You still need to build following gstreamer plugins to make gnome-music play songs for you:

gst-plugins-good

gst-plugins-bad

gst-plugins-ugly

*I got success in building gst-plugins-good and gst-plugins-bad.

but gst-plugins-ugly was troubling me. Everytime I tried to build gst-plugins-ugly it says Module ”gst-plugins-ugly” could not be found.

When I told about this problem to Jackson Isaac he asked me whether I have configured jhbuildrc correctly or not. i.e. it has the following line in it or not:

moduleset = 'gnome-world-3.12'

As I added the above statement to my jhbuildrc file which in .config folder, I once again tried to build gst-plugins-ugly. To my surprise, It started building :):)

I ran gnome-music using:

$jhbuild run gnome-music

Yay! There is no stop or minus sign against every song and I can play any song just by clicking on it.

screenshot with stop sign

Screenshot without stop sign

Thanks to #gnome-music to make me play my favorite songs on this wonderful application. I welcome suggestions from the development team if I still need something more to add to make music play and help others too. :D

I will have to wait till gnome-music gets stabilized to write its help. In the mean time my mentor Ekaterina Gerasimova (kittykat) suggested me to work on gedit (GNOME text editor)or evince (Document viewer). I simply typed the command jhbuild build gedit in the terminal. I could successfully build gedit 3.12. As its user interface has undergone a huge change its help will have to be updated accordingly.

When I run the command jhbuild run gedit, a newwindow opened as shown below in the screeshot.

gedit 3.12

Yes, It is a screen shot for gedit 3.12. A brand new, cool and a simplified look. The gedit’s new avatar does not include File, Edit, View, Search, Tools and Documents menus. Instead it has buttons to open, create and save files and all the other important functions are included in the gear icon button as drop down list. I am wondering can I use mouse to perform cut-copy-paste. It could be very difficult for new users as they may not know the keyboard shortcuts for cut-copy-paste. Our documentation help can reduce this tension to a great extend. :) UI for new version and the older version of gedit could be easily compared with the image below:

gedit 3.8.3

whatever are the differences I am enjoying updating the help for gedit’s new UI.